The Importance of your Website's Navigation to SEO

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Importance of your Website's Navigation to SEO

Your navigation does more than just show your users what is important and how to maneuver through your site. It also shows the search engines! The words you choose in your navigation and the pages you link to play a huge part on how well your site will rank in the search engines.

Navigation Structure

To begin with, it's best to use what is called an "F format" navigation for your site. This means your navigation should run across the top and left side of your website. Your top navigation should include links to general company and website information such as "Industries Served", "About Us", "Request a Quote", "Contact Us", etc. It's important to always include a "Home" link in the top navigation as well.

Your left navigation should include links to your products and/or services. The size of your left navigation will depend on the size of your website. Just make you don't have too many links or you can overwhelm your visitors and they may go elsewhere. Fewer than twenty links is ideal. Also, it's crucial that your navigation is in text, not images. The search engines can't read the words in an image; therefore your site will not get "credit" for them. You'll understand the importance of this as you read further.

Use Keywords in your Navigation

Now that your basic navigation structure it set, it's time to optimize the navigation for the search engines. Whenever you can, use specific product or service words in your navigation links. In other words, put your keywords in your navigation. By doing this, you can help improve your rankings in the search engines, especially Google. There are two reasons why putting your keywords in the navigation is so effective.

Here's an example of part of a website's navigation to help demonstrate. This site specializes in metal stamping:

Now:

Small Stamping
Medium Stamping
Large Stamping

Change to:

Small Metal Stamping
Medium Metal Stamping
Large Metal Stamping

By adding "metal" to these links in the navigation, we've added "metal" to every page on the site three (more) times. So this is actually another way to saturate a site with a keyword. Also, the search engines give more weight to words that are in links, so we've really improved the visibility for "metal stamping" on this site.

To illustrate the second reason adding keywords to your navigation helps, here's part of navigation from of a site that manufactures tape products:

Example Two:

Now:

Products
Product Development
Capabilities
Contact Us

Change to:

Tape Products
Tape Product Development
Adhesive Capabilities
Contact Us

Again, every page of your site will get more visibility for the keywords "tape" and "adhesive". But there is another neat thing that happens when you add keywords to your navigation. Google gives the page the link is pointing to credit for the keywords in the navigation, too. So the page that "adhesive capabilities" is linking to will get credit for that keyword. The more pages your website has, the more credit that page gets for that keyword. This is a great way to increase your ranking for a keyword in Google.

As you can see, your navigation plays an important role in your website's success. Just a few small changes to your navigation can make a big difference in how your site ranks in the search engines. Take a few minutes to review your website's navigation and make sure it's formatted correctly and the most important keywords are there.